Is flying popular among the tech professionals who can afford it? Where do they do their flight training? Typical flight schools seem sort of old school for a place like the Valley.
Not really - like you said, flight schools are old school. # of pilots in the Bay Area seems to be lower than the national average from the stats I have seen. From what I have seen, not many people know that flying themselves is even an option on the table. I would love to say that I have a great group of pilot friends my age that I fly with regularly...not the case!
I feel like there's something there - updating the training process, making it "cool". Flying yourself is viable if you can afford it, and not as expensive and some might think when the costs are shared. Plus, a modern plane, such as a Cirrus, feels kind of like a jet with the screens, autopilot, etc. New pilots love it. I've observed that if you can get a group of professional instructors together who know what they're doing, with nice planes to train in, flying becomes a lot more attractive to "normal" people. How traditional flight schools in the Bay Area are received is something I've been wondering about. Flying is a good fit for the engineer/programmer personality, but there's this gap where the industry can't seem to relate to the real world.
Edit: By the way, here's a cool startup that seems to be helping to close that gap: https://openairplane.com/. Just got a round of funding I believe.
Yeah - perception is everything. Making it cool again is key to drive the market. The problem is that commercial aviation provides a continual reinforcement of why the industry isn't glamorous!
Openairplane is a great company for existing pilots who want to rent planes more easily, especially while traveling.